Commander Keen

Before Quake, before Doom, before even Wolfenstein 3D, id Software
made its name in the early 1990s with a series of shareware
platform games starring eight year old Billy Blaze. By day he was
just another school kid, but when he donned his brother's NFL
helmet he became Commander Keen, saviour of the universe. Or
something like that. Plot was never a strongpoint for id...

Pogo Powered Platformer

Anyway, flash forward ten years and id's cult classic series has
been brought to the GameBoy Color, courtesy of David A Palmer
Productions. The only real surprise is that it hasn't been done
sooner - the cute, colourful cartoon-style graphics and platform
hopping action are a perfect match for Nintendo's hand-held, and
Palmer (with a little help from id's own Adrian Carmack) have done
a great job of producing something which is instantly identifiable
as a Commander Keen adventure without simply cloning one of the
original PC games.

Once again it is up to you to save the world, armed only with a zap
gun and a pogo stick. The manual says something about plasma
crystals and sub-space anomalies, but the short version presented
in the opening screen is that "the Earth is in trouble, this looks
like a job for Commander Keen!" And let's face it, what more do you
need to know?

The Dopefish Lives!

Your mission begins in the Hub, from where you can choose to travel
to any of the three worlds that make up the game, each of which
features its own unique visual style and enemies. Security drones,
mobile mushrooms, slugs, bug-eyed monsters and robotic warriors are
all present and correct, with a mixture of new creatures and guest
appearances from old favourites like the
Dopefish.

The worlds are in turn split into three levels each, with the now
traditional id gameplay format of pressing a few switches, finding
coloured key cards and matching them to the appropriate door, with
the odd teleporter thrown in for good measure. Hardly innovative,
but all good clean fun. Settings vary from fire-drenched canyons
and robot factories to forests and alien labs, complete with
bottled Keen clones. All of them are colourful and beautifully
designed, and there are some great button-pounding moments to be
had, dodging enemies while trying to land on a precarious platform,
or leaping through the air on your pogo stick, hopping between
bricks which are constantly sliding in and out of a wall above a
bottomless chasm.

The boss encounters at the end of each world are a little hit and
miss. Each boss has his own weak spot that you have to shoot, but
it's not always obvious what you need to do. On the other hand, the
first boss I reached proved to be something of a push over. If you
do get stuck you can always give up, move on to another world and
come back to it later though. A slightly clumsy password system
saves your position as a sixteen character code at the end of each
level, and this records how many lives and continues you have left
as well as which of the game's nine levels you have completed. As
you always start back at the hub after inputting a password, this
means that you can easily move on to another world instead of going
back to where you left off.

Conclusion

The gameplay might be decidely old school, but the combination of
imaginative characters, colourful backdrops and pogo hopping action
makes Commander Keen a lot of fun for both younger gamers and those
of us old enough to remember the originals. And to make sure it
caters for everyone, there is a choice of three difficulty settings
which alter the speed at which your enemies move as well as how
frequently you will earn new lives and continues.

The only real downside is that the game is (like its hero) perhaps
a little on the short side, but while it lasts it's a lot of fun.